


Suppression

by vanete_druse



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drug Addiction, Eating Disorders, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 07:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanete_druse/pseuds/vanete_druse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock resents Mycroft for the internal struggle he's had to deal with his entire life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suppression

**Author's Note:**

> I just can't get enough of the angst. This was actually a really hard fic for me to write, and hopefully I did it justice.

  
Sherlock is ten. His little black curls dance against his angular face as his weightless body squeezes into places he has no reason to be. This is why he’s in his father’s study, fingers flitting against the bindings of the books along the wall when he hears it.

Running water, too loud to be unmistakable, not loud enough to cover the retching noises. “…Mycroft?”

Everything stops. The toilet flushes and the door opens, so Sherlock runs into the hallway, nearly smacking into his older brother. There are so many things he wants - no, needs - to say in that instance but the words don’t materialize. “Go to bed, Sherlock.”

When Mycroft walks away, Sherlock is left in the door of a washroom filled with the acrid scent of vomit, and all he can think is: Crofty didn’t look ill.

*

Daddy is screaming. Both Mummy and Mycroft are in tears. Sherlock catches hints of words being tossed around - stress, weight, disorder \- and he doesn’t feel safe even though he’s in the kitchen, a cup of his favorite juice in hand. The marble and the tile and the wood that comprises of said room is rather acoustically inclined, and all the phrases are bouncing around like flies in a container; closing his eyes, he can imagine pulling the opaque wings of fragile glass off to crush them into fairy dust beneath his fingertips.

When he tries to slink back to his bedroom, Sherlock makes eye contact with Mycroft, and there’s a darkness lurking behind those once so-familiar eyes that leaves a footprint in the very back of his young mind.

*

Bulimia.

The word sounds like puke, and Sherlock cannot think of it without his stomach involuntarily lurching. He’s trying to keep it under control in a room full of immature children laughing over some inconceivably comical aspect of the film that he can’t even begin to fathom through the tears and the sickness.

It comes to be too much to hear the harsh jeers all around him, and he’s unused to feeling anything, much less this overwhelming mixture of emotions that floods him like a tsunami. The teacher doesn’t even look at him twice as she issues the hallway pass and lets him run to seek solace in a dirty toilet, trying to calm not only his stomach but the sobs racking through his chest.

Sherlock stays there until Victor is sent to retrieve him. “D’ya, dunno, want to talk about it?”

He doesn’t, but for once he appreciates the offer.

*

Sherlock is fifteen now. He’s still lanky, still retaining that head full of juvenile curls, but he’s filling out and there’s the tiniest of weight upon his stomach that rests along his belt line. His parents say nothing, but when Mycroft visits, slimmed down to a perfect weight, and it makes Sherlock re-evaluate every bite he’s ever taken in his older brother’s absence. During dinner he can only bring himself to stare at the food in front of him, his hunger dissipating to disgust at the sounds of sloshy liquid hitting the porcelain bowl later that night when everyone is supposed to be asleep.

On the last day, Mycroft takes him out to dinner alone. Sherlock knows that Mummy put him up to this; he’s seen the distressed look gracing her features, wanting to pick up the silver ware and bring all the fat and the calories into his body but he can’t. He can’t even do it under Mycroft’s intense gaze. “…I know, Mummy’s worried.”

“Then why are you so intent upon worrying her?” Sherlock sips at his water and stares at the basket of bread sticks. “Really, Sherlock, stop being so infantile. Talk to me. I can help you-“

“Help me? How on Earth can you speak to me like that, as if you’re innocent, when you know full well that you’re responsible for the way that I am?”

Mycroft sighs. Salads are placed in front of them and neither of them even touches their forks. “Harboring such anger…but I supposed I can’t have expected anything different. My teenage years were spent blaming everyone else but myself for my own problems.”

There’s a nagging in the back of Sherlock’s mind that wants to throw a fit - fling bits of salad into Mycroft’s face, scream at him, making him hold the responsibility for this insanity tearing him apart - but he can’t do anything but simmer quiet, unable to respond to small talk.

Sometimes, he wishes he didn’t see so much. He wishes he couldn’t see Mycroft’s pain and regret written in the lines of his quiet demeanor and he wishes he couldn’t see how this was mostly his fault. It’d make being resentful so much easier.

Afterwards, Sherlock is left sitting on the uncomfortable leather seated waiting benches in the lobby of the restaurant, trying not to think of Mycroft hunched over a toilet.

*

Sherlock is twenty when he finds that Chemistry is incredibly practical. When he’s frustrated and needy, he can turn to Chemistry that will whisper an answer to him, to cure him of his troubles.

Especially now. There’s no hesitance, no calories to count, no planning meals ahead of time. He barely has to eat at all in fact - he’s gotten food down to a precise science. Indulging in any more than necessary is simply greed; the basics are all he needs.

Sherlock’s administering the just-right dosage of his Elixir, calming the gurgling of his insides, barely having enough time to conceal his tools before it hits, dragging him to sprawl along the sofa as a vision of a Skinnier Sherlock dances along the gray matter of his brain to tempt him with everything he never seems to have had.

A key in the lock. With his eyes closed, he can almost see the metal tumblers click into place and release. Two sets of feet upon the poorly carpeted flooring (heavy, clumsy steps of a young adult male, and the daintier, softer steps of a young adult female) - his roommate, Sebastian, and his girlfriend, no doubt.

One eye open. They’re staring at his disheveled form. “You alright, mate?” The concern doesn’t quite reach Sebastian’s eyes, and the way he’s gripping the unfamiliar girl’s waist confirms his insincerity.

“I am quite fine, thank you. I’m also not intending to move so I suggest you find another place to shag.” He chooses to ignore the look of surprise and embarrassment gracing their features - he’s slipping into The Place, but it’s different this time around…

“What a bloody lazy sod you are! I indulge you in all your stupid fancies, and not once do you return the favor. I’m not asking you, Sherlock, I’m telling you - you and your fat arse need to leave the dorm. Now.”

All Sherlock hears is fat. He tries to stand but his empty stomach rebels, and his body and mind are weak with drug. “Sebastian, I think he’s really sick or something…” The exhaustion is seeping into his skin, hot and cold - did he use too much? - and he wants to shake them off, hating the way the two were circling him like vultures waiting to feast on his death.

He can’t keep his eyes open. The scales are there to haunt him.

*

“You were undernourished.”

Mycroft’s sitting at his bedside when he wakes up. One hand is clasped upon a sheathed umbrella that’s completely dry. “Because your weight had gotten so low, the dosage of cocaine you gave yourself, calculated from your height, was far too high, and you began to overdose.”

Sherlock’s throat is sore, and his body aches, but his brain is limbering up as he wakes, restless and needy; he needs the molasses-like intoxication as a buffer. “Mummy is downstairs in the cafeteria with Father. He is not pleased.”

He ignores his brother. Staring at the wall in front of him, he wants for their parents to walk into the room, letting Mummy shower him with kisses while Father rants and raves and lectures about the stupidity behind both anorexia and illegal substances and how Sherlock is too smart for that.

The next day, he’s forced into meeting with a therapist who holds his hands and asks him about how everything makes him feel. And the third day, he escapes in freshly laundered scrubs through a back door.

Mycroft is thoroughly flustered over the whole ordeal, but he has a friend who owes him a favor. Barely anyone hears a whisper before it’s pushed so far back in the government office’s closet that not even an ink-sniffing bloodhound could find it.

*

When Sherlock first meets Lestrade, he’s twenty-five, and it’s exactly three hours, four minutes, and twelve seconds after Mycroft’s called to inform him of his new government position. Of course that means Mummy and Daddy are so proud - they even call him to rub it in his face, not even bothering to ask him how he’s doing in their prideful streak.

The age difference doesn’t even register in his mind. Any accomplishment feels old and unremarkable underneath the shadow of his older brother. A part of him whispers in the back of his mind, why bother?

Sherlock’s aware of what this creates within him. He’d even gotten himself to a point where logic dictated impulse, and he’s able to maintain a enough of a healthy lifestyle - skin and bones and stomach - to get by, but this catches him off guard; he’s bored to tears and so far down he’s forgotten what the light feels like.

Impulse gnaws at him, but it’s the long vacation and he doesn’t have access to the Chemistry store room, and right now he doesn’t have the patience anyways. Sherlock knows all the right words, and his smile is bright enough to get him to where he wants to be.

There’s a booth in the back of the hazy club, his heart pounding from anticipation as addicts with glass doll eyes lay around, unmoving. His dealer is, at glance, unassuming - leaning towards middle aged, salt and pepper hair, cheap clothes that are strangely clean - yet when Sherlock gives himself a moment, he can see the traces of edginess laced along his hit or miss attractive face.

He stops caring when the dealer looks at him and says, “A gram, straight coke, for a tenner.”

The price should have been a red light for Sherlock, but in his desperation, all he saw was an amazing deal that needs to be taken advantage of before it ceased to become available. “Perfect.” He slaps the money on the table, half of what he brought for it.

Almost as if it were planned for the exact moment Sherlock makes himself vulnerable, a door slams, and he knows. The edginess, the clothes, the price - it all comes together to make Sherlock realize he’s been fooled. Flurries of chaos erupts as the raid begins, but when the dealer pulls out his badge and tells him that he’s really Sergeant Lestrade and that he’s under arrest for some drug law he never bothered to learn about, he doesn’t even try to escape.

Instead, he looks up into Lestrade’s face with all the fear and need that he can muster. “Please, Sergeant. You have no idea how much I ache inside. I need something. Anything.” Sherlock even produces a few tears, because he knows how much sympathetic people are affected by that, and those thickly lashed eyes hold no hardness when they look at him.

Lestrade doesn’t say anything as he puts the cuffs on him and ushers him into the back of a van with too many other junkies that coo and hiss at him, but when Mycroft bails him out a few hours later, there’s a grim in his inner jacket, along with a number. Call me when you run out.

Sherlock doesn’t want to, but he does. Lestrade shows him there’s more to life than weight.

*

John walks into Sherlock’s life when he’s thirty, and he thinks he has everything under control. He’s on speaking terms with Mycroft, Lestrade keeps an eye on him by letting him help out on cases, and more or less he’s gotten himself into a decent eating pattern. Getting kicked out of his flat is the first huge disturbance in his strange little life.

When Stamford brings John around, he’s intrigued but figures he’s just another temporary flatmate that he’ll eventually drive away. Sherlock’s at the point where it just doesn’t matter anymore, so long as there’s another problem to be solved, another killer to find, another distraction waiting for him.

But John flatters him. He listens to his explanations with rapt attention and takes his insults and moods in stride. Even if the time comes where John’s at his breaking point, whenever he leaves, it’s never permanent. He comes back to their flat without a second thought, encouraging him towards that steaming plate of food with every compliment and showcase of general caring, completely ignorant of his actions.

There is only one drawback to John, but it’s also Sherlock’s favorite attribute of him; his curiosity. It’s why he can’t get mad when John finally asks, “So am I ever going to learn what this feud is about?” even though he does choose supper as an appropriate time to do so.

Sherlock has never officially talked to anyone. Mycroft’s known with just a look into his face, and he’s never even mentioned his older brother to Lestrade. John’s the only person who’s wormed his way close enough to even know about the ‘feud’, of sorts. To see the resentment and guilt firsthand.

If he can tell anyone, it’s the good doctor. He sets his fork down and warns, “It’s quite long. And a bit personal.”

“I’m not going anywhere, and you don’t have to tell me. I’m just here if you need a mate to listen.”

Dismiss it. Wave your hand around and never bring up the subject again. Lie and come up with some grand scheme in which Mycroft has betrayed you yet not in an unforgivable way. “Well. It started when I was ten, and Mycroft was seventeen…”

At the end, John is still there. The next day, Sherlock finds a sticky note in the bathroom mirror that reads: You are beautiful just the way you are.


End file.
